(You can find the usual daily Quickie-style analysis of all the day's other sports news in the post directly below this one.)
Here's the morning's top debate:
Who was the bigger NLCS Game 1 hero?
Tom Glavine, ageless in throwing 7 shutout innings and limiting the Cards to 4 hits, knowing the rest of the rotation behind him is slop?
Or Carlos Beltran, accounting for all of the Mets' runs with a 2-run HR and evoking memories of his breakout 2004 postseason?
My vote is for Glavine, who recently has been argued to be the most clutch playoff pitcher of our era. And he helped his cause last night.
Beltran's HR was great (and certainly necessary), but on any given night, the Mets' O can come from a half-dozen spots in the lineup.
But amazing starting pitching? That's the vastly more rare commodity for this team.
Meanwhile, Game 2 intrigue: Tony LaRussa has moved Chris Carpenter up to start tonight on 4 days' rest, rather than Game 3 tomorrow on 5 days' rest.
Here's the most interesting stat, which you'll probably hear 100 times today:
4 Days' Rest: 9-6, 3.64 ERA (23 GS)
5 Days' Rest: 4-1, .97 ERA (6 GS)
The context is set: If Carpenter doesn't win, the Genius will find himself with a severe case of the second-guessers.
ALCS Game 3: Weather or Not? There's nothing more intriguing than the weather being the biggest X-factor in a baseball playoff game.
The conditions in Detroit are supposed to be so spotty (temp in the 40s, wind at 20 mph, ominous rainclouds) that they moved the game to 4:30 to try to avoid a "weather-out."
The more brutal the weather, the better: Baseball fans in Michigan might have forgotten what October baseball is like; this football weather will help ease their transition.
Finally, I absolutely love this emerging controversy over the questionable radar-gun clocking of the pitchers -- particularly the ones showing triple-digits.
Is juicing the radar-gun numbers so terrible for the sport, given that fans WANT to see that 100 mark? Will Joel Zumaya's performance demand an asterisk?
It's misleading, sure, but in this case, I think fans WANT to be misled. It's not like batters are using the radar gun to make their decisions about whether to swing.
(Particularly versus Zumaya. Just ask the heart of the Yankees' order.)
-- D.S.
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11 comments:
Here's one for the conspiracy theorist:
The Oak-Det game was moved up so that MLB could have both games on TV without them overlapping and splitting ratings. But wanted to make sure to keep the StL-NY game in prime time because its New York. Even though it makes more sense to move the NL game up because those teams need to travel tonight in order to play tomorrow. Oak-Det doesn't need to travel.
This is the real reason the game was moved up.
So they're able on MLB.com's Gameday to show the projectory of pitches. Well, how hard would it be, with the time coding on the film image, to compute the distance and divide by the time the ball's in the air, to get an ACCURATE speed reading? I bet this could be done almost instanteously, AND it would give us an idea of what stadiums are, indeed, guilty of juicing their numbers.
(And, I want to see Zumaya develop a knuckleball to go with the 100-mph heater....you wanna freak out a batter?)
As fast as Zumaya is, my grandfather said that it was not quite Walter Johnson.
Supposedly, there some guys tried to measure The Big Train's fastball and it was between 107-109.
Some would say this is riduculous but on the other hand the man did pitch 110 shutouts and had a career ERA of 2.17 and still holds the record by not giving up a homer in 369 consecutive inning (to put that in perspective that's like if you pitched more inning a season than anyone else in baseball, not giving a homer up for a season and a half)
The famous story is also told of the time where they were in the late innings of a game and it was getting dark, there were two strikes on the batter and the catcher went out to talk to him. he handed the catcher the ball, went into his windup and made his delivery motion as the catcher slapped his mit and then rolled the ball back towards the mound as they walked off the diamond. The Ump called strike 3 and the batter argued that the ball was outside and got thrown out.
The story proves a couple of things.
1. Umpires often couldn't acually see his fastball.
2. Batters often couldn't see the fastball.
3. Somehow this was a known fact to the point that they tried this in an acual game.
so i'll save "fastest ever" for the Big Train
oh yeah he in 1925 he won 20 games and batted .433
just thought i'd throw that in
i worked with a guy who was a pitcher for the A's in the 80's and he told me years ago that the guns were innacurate. he said to subtract at least 8 mph from anything you see.
I agree with it having to be Glavine. Knowing you are the anchor of a pitching staff after losing your #1 and arguably the #2 (postseason success included for El Duque) and stepping up AGAIN...clutch performance.
As for the radar guns...I KNOW they're off. Fact is, Wagner has not thrown over 96-97 all year. He doesn't have the triple digit fastball anymore. Then last night, he's all of a sudden gassing 99-100. Baloney!!! Plus, Zumaya can't throw 103 - don't buy it. Maybe 100 (which if you take off 3 mph, that drops Wagner back to realism).
And, I HOPE it snows...that would be tre-sweet to see baseball in snow.
The guns are ridiculous. Todd Jones hitting 96 consistently the other night? Robertson in the mid- to high-90s? That just doesn't happen. And I think the last time Wagner hit 100 was two seasons ago in Philly. Gimme a break.
As for the weather excuse, considering how bad the weather will be all day in Detroit, that's just Fox's way of making sure the better-rated NYM/STL series gets to be in primetime while the "no one oustide of Oakland or Detroit cares" series will be on in the afternoon.
The fun part is, today the pundits will say 'The Mets did the right thing to challenge Pujols' and then tomorrow if Pujols has a couple big hits they'll say 'The Mets never should've challenged Pujols'. God I hate sportswriters.
generik
Actually, I'd say the defense for the Mets trumped the pitching. Glavine was ok but not great. He got some calls off the plate, but the Cards hit a few hard balls that, if they had fallen for hits, would have changed the tenor of the game. Bad baserunning didn't help them either.
I'm not so sure that you couldn't measure speed from a fixed point (10 feet in front of the rubber okay?) to the plate. You don't have to measure the speed over the entire time the ball's in the air. The gun is measuring only over a fixed time that it takes the radar to bounce from the gun to the ball and back. You could do a 50-foot sample, rather than complete hand-to-mitt.
I bet it could be done from a fixed, dugout-level camera.
As a fan, I do NOT want the guns "juiced". Show the actual speed of the ball.
I am still going with Mets in 6 and then Tigers over Mets in 4.
Sure pitch speed is a sexy stat but give me a maddux 80 mph heater anyday of the week. His pitches were so slow I think most fans could make contact. Of course all we would be able to do is ground out to short. Of course compare him with the rocket and my argument goes out the window. Both have similar win totals but the rocket has way more K's so I guess it could go either way. Im a braves fan so you know which way my bread is buttered.
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